Sales kick-off events in 2022
It’s Q4 and you’re on the home straight. If you are a Sales Leader, you are likely to spend the last few weeks of 2021 scrambling to close deals before the year-end while planning for your team’s highlight of the year in Q1: the annual sales kick-off event.
The difference this year is that you’re probably trying to figure out how to manage it under the current circumstances. We all accept that, regardless of how far we’ve come through the pandemic, it’s too soon to expect your people to attend a fully live sales kick-off event. Their safety and comfort levels remain your top priority.
It’s for the same reasons that your 2022 SKO event is more important than ever before. After 18 challenging months of remote working, dispersed teams, and lack of human interaction, the “next normal” is gradually allowing us a greater sense of freedom and an opportunity to shape the way we share, connect, and celebrate in a post-COVID era.
In this time, we have all learned how to facilitate critical conversations and information-sharing without being in the same room, and we’ve come up with some ingenious, creative, and effective solutions. Applying these same principles to your annual SKO event is a natural next step in the process.
What makes a good SKO exceptional?
A good SKO will energize, inform, and excite your people about your organisation’s strategy and direction, and align teams to make them more productive in 2022 and beyond. It also provides the perfect forum to celebrate your people’s 2021 accomplishments, setting you on the right path for another year of success.
For a virtual or hybrid SKO, the core principles remain the same. But with expert planning and execution, you can transform a good SKO into an interactive, immersive, engaging experience that will keep your team motivated throughout the year.
Start here…
Inspiring your team and building morale is a key element of any SKO, as important as sharing information and celebrating success. So, before you start planning virtual happy hours and hiring guest speakers, it’s crucial that you understand your audience: What’s bothering your sales force right now? Supply issues? New competitor in the market? Unfamiliar new products to sell? Maybe they’re just feeling demotivated because they haven’t hit target?
Listen to their challenges, address them, and they’ll be more receptive to your messages.
Our practical guide below offers 8 tips for delivering an impactful hybrid SKO.
